Media
Showing 1–32 of 42 results
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Hollywood in China
Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market$32.99The inside story of the U.S.-Chinese superpower conflict playing out behind the scenes of today’s movie industry, from the leading media scholar
China surpassed North America to become the world ’s largest movie market in 2020. Formerly the focus of exotic fascination in the golden age of Hollywood, today the Chinese are a make-or-break audience for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. And movies are now an essential part of China’s global “soft power” strategy: a Chinese real estate tycoon, who until recently was the major shareholder of the AMC theater chain, built the world’s largest film production facility. Behind the curtains, as this brilliant new book reveals, movies have become one of the biggest areas of competition between the world’s two remaining superpowers.
Will Hollywood be eclipsed by its Chinese counterpart? No author is better positioned to untangle this riddle than Ying Zhu, a leading expert on Chinese film and media. In fascinating vignettes, Hollywood in China unravels the century-long relationship between Hollywood and China for the first time.
Blending cultural history, business, and international relations, Hollywood in China charts multiple power dynamics and teases out how competing political and economic interests as well as cultural values are manifested in the art and artifice of filmmaking on a global scale, and with global ramifications. The book is an inside look at the intense business and political maneuvering that is shaping the movies and the U.S.-China relationship itself—revealing a headlines-grabbing conflict that is playing out not only on the high seas, but on the silver screen.
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Killing the Story
Journalists Risking Their Lives to Uncover the Truth in Mexico$25.99A harrowing and unforgettable look at reporting in Mexico, one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a journalist
In 2017, Mexico edged out Iraq and Syria as the deadliest country in the world in which to be a reporter, with at least fourteen journalists killed over the course of the year. The following year another ten journalists were murdered, joining the almost 150 reporters who have been killed since the mid-2000s in a wave of violence that has accompanied Mexico’s war on drugs.
In Killing the Story, award-winning journalist and filmmaker Témoris Grecko reveals how journalists are risking their lives to expose crime and corruption. From the streets of Veracruz to the national television studios of Mexico City, Grecko writes about the heroic work of reporters at all levels—from the local self-trained journalist, Moises Sanchez, whose body was found dismembered by the side of a road after he reported on corruption by the state’s governor, to high-profile journalists such as Javier Valdez Cárdenas, gunned down in the streets of Sinaloa, and Carmen Aristegui, battling the forces attempting to censor her.
In the vein of Charles Bowden’s Murder City and Anna Politskaya’s A Russian Diary, Killing the Story is a powerful memorial to the work of Grecko’s lost colleagues, which shows a country riven by brutality, hypocrisy, and corruption, and sheds a light on how those in power are bent on silencing those determined to reveal the truth and bring an end to corruption.
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Rap on Trial
Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America$24.99A groundbreaking exposé about the alarming use of rap lyrics as criminal evidence to convict and incarcerate young men of color
Should Johnny Cash have been charged with murder after he sang, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”? Few would seriously subscribe to this notion of justice. Yet in 2001, a rapper named Mac whose music had gained national recognition was convicted of manslaughter after the prosecutor quoted liberally from his album Shell Shocked. Mac was sentenced to thirty years in prison, where he remains. And his case is just one of many nationwide.
Over the last three decades, as rap became increasingly popular, prosecutors saw an opportunity: they could present the sometimes violent, crime-laden lyrics of amateur rappers as confessions to crimes, threats of violence, evidence of gang affiliation, or revelations of criminal motive—and judges and juries would go along with it. Detectives have reopened cold cases on account of rap lyrics and videos alone, and prosecutors have secured convictions by presenting such lyrics and videos of rappers as autobiography. Now, an alarming number of aspiring rappers are imprisoned. No other form of creative expression is treated this way in the courts.
Rap on Trial places this disturbing practice in the context of hip hop history and exposes what’s at stake. It’s a gripping, timely exploration at the crossroads of contemporary hip hop and mass incarceration.
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Make My Day
Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan$28.99Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times
“Singular, stylish and slightly intoxicating in its scope.”
—Rolling StoneAcclaimed media critic J. Hoberman’s masterful and majestic exploration of the Reagan years as seen through the unforgettable movies of the era
The third book in a brilliant and ambitious trilogy, celebrated cultural and film critic J. Hoberman’s Make My Day is a major new work of film and pop culture history. In it he chronicles the Reagan years, from the waning days of the Watergate scandal when disaster films like Earthquake ruled the box office to the nostalgia of feel-good movies like Rocky and Star Wars, and the delirium of the 1984 presidential campaign and beyond.
Bookended by the Bicentennial celebrations and the Iran-Contra affair, the period of Reagan’s ascendance brought such movie events as Jaws, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Ghostbusters, Blue Velvet, and Back to the Future, as well as the birth of MTV, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the Second Cold War.
An exploration of the synergy between American politics and popular culture, Make My Day is the concluding volume of Hoberman’s Found Illusions trilogy; the first volume, The Dream Life, was described by Slate‘s David Edelstein as “one of the most vital cultural histories I’ve ever read”; Film Comment called the second, An Army of Phantoms, “utterly compulsive reading.” Reagan, a supporting player in Hoberman’s previous volumes, here takes center stage as the peer of Indiana Jones and John Rambo, the embodiment of a Hollywood that, even then, no longer existed.
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The Sky Is Falling
How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism$26.99A Sunday Times (London), Best Book of 2018
“A thoughtful, entertaining, and occasionally profound critical study of the texts that entertain, move and, sometimes, shape us.”
—The Spectator (London)“A bold, witty, and brilliantly argued analysis of the role pop culture has played in the rise of American extremism.”
—Ruth Reichl
“You’ll never look at your favorite movies and TV shows the same way again. And you shouldn’t.”
—Steven Soderbergh
A bestselling cultural journalist shows how pop culture prepared Americans to embrace extreme politicsAlmost everything has been invoked to account for Trump’s victory and the rise of the alt-right, from job loss to racism to demography—everything, that is, except popular culture. In The Sky Is Falling bestselling cultural journalist Peter Biskind dives headlong into two decades of popular culture—from superhero franchises such as the Dark Knight, X-Men, and the Avengers and series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to thrillers like Homeland and 24—and emerges to argue that these shows are saturated with the values that are currently animating our extreme politics.
Where once centrist institutions and their agents—cops and docs, soldiers and scientists, as well as educators, politicians, and “experts” of every stripe—were glorified by mainstream Hollywood, the heroes of today’s movies and TV, whether far right or far left, have overthrown this quaint ideological consensus. Many of our shows dramatize extreme circumstances—an apocalypse of one sort or another—that require extreme behavior to deal with, behavior such as revenge, torture, lying, and even the vigilante violence traditionally discouraged in mainstream entertainment.
In this bold, provocative, and witty investigation, Biskind shows how extreme culture now calls the shots. It has become, in effect, the new mainstream.
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Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Communication Politics in Dubious Times$18.95 – $22.95An updated edition of the “penetrating study” examining how the current state of mass media puts our democracy at risk (Noam Chomsky).
What happens when a few conglomerates dominate all major aspects of mass media, from newspapers and magazines to radio and broadcast television? After all the hype about the democratizing power of the internet, is this new technology living up to its promise? Since the publication of this prescient work, which won Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize and the Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the concentration of media power and the resultant “hypercommercialization of media” has only intensified.
Robert McChesney lays out his vision for what a truly democratic society might look like, offering compelling suggestions for how the media can be reformed as part of a broader program of democratic renewal. Rich Media, Poor Democracy remains as vital and insightful as ever and continues to serve as an important resource for researchers, students, and anyone who has a stake in the transformation of our digital commons.
This new edition includes a major new preface by McChesney, where he offers both a history of the transformation in media since the book first appeared; a sweeping account of the organized efforts to reform the media system; and the ongoing threats to our democracy as journalism has continued its sharp decline.
“Those who want to know about the relationship of media and democracy must read this book.” —Neil Postman
“If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book.” —Bill Moyers
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The First Lady of Radio
Eleanor Roosevelts Historic Broadcasts$17.99 – $25.95“This anthology of 38 addresses . . . offer[s] a means for visiting anew the lifework of an extraordinary American woman” (HistoryNet).
A tie-in to the American RadioWorks® documentary—with audio and video content.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s groundbreaking career as a professional radio broadcaster is almost entirely forgotten. As First Lady, she hosted a series of prime time programs that revolutionized how Americans related to their chief executive and his family. Now, The First Lady of Radio rescues these broadcasts from the archives, presenting a carefully curated sampling of transcripts of Roosevelt’s most famous and influential radio shows, including addresses on the bombing of Pearl Harbor, D-Day, V-E Day, and women’s issues of the times. Edited and set into context by award-winning author and radio producer Stephen Drury Smith—and with a foreword by Roosevelt’s famed biographer, historian Blanche Wiesen Cook—The First Lady of Radio is both a historical treasure and a fascinating window onto the power and the influence of a pioneering First Lady.
“An intriguing glimpse into the social and political changes of the period.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Eleanor Roosevelt] was terrified of speaking in public at first, and her high-pitched voice could sail off uncontrollably. Yet she became one of the most effective speakers of her time.” —David McCullough
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Global Muckraking
100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World$19.95Crusading journalists from Sinclair Lewis to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have played a central role in American politics: checking abuses of power, revealing corporate misdeeds, and exposing government corruption. Muckraking journalism is part and parcel of American democracy. But how many people know about the role that muckraking has played around the world?
This groundbreaking new book presents the most important examples of world-changing journalism, spanning one hundred years and every continent. Carefully curated by prominent international journalists working in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, Global Muckraking includes Ken Saro-Wiwa’s defense of the Ogoni people in the Niger Delta; Horacio Verbitsky’s uncovering of the gruesome disappearance of political detainees in Argentina; Gareth Jones’s coverage of the Ukraine famine of 1932-33; missionary newspapers’ coverage of Chinese foot binding in the nineteenth century; Dwarkanath Ganguli’s exposé of the British “coolie” trade in nineteenth-century Assam, India; and many others.
Edited by the noted author and journalist Anya Schiffrin, Global Muckraking is a sweeping introduction to international journalism that has galvanized the world’s attention. In an era when human rights are in the spotlight and the fate of newspapers hangs in the balance, here is both a riveting read and a sweeping argument for why the world needs long-form investigative reporting.
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Blocked on Weibo
What Gets Suppressed on Chinas Version of Twitter (And Why)$15.95Though often described with foreboding buzzwords such as “The Great Firewall” and the “censorship regime,” Internet regulation in China is rarely either obvious or straightforward. This was the inspiration for China specialist Jason Q. Ng to write an innovative computer script that would make it possible to deduce just which terms are suppressed on China’s most important social media site, Sina Weibo. The remarkable and groundbreaking result is Blocked on Weibo, which began as a highly praised blog and has been expanded here to list over 150 forbidden keywords, as well as offer possible explanations why the Chinese government would find these terms sensitive.
As Ng explains, Weibo (roughly the equivalent of Twitter), with over 500 million registered accounts, censors hundreds of words and phrases, ranging from fairly obvious terms, including “tank” (a reference to the “Tank Man” who stared down the Chinese army in Tiananmen Square) and the names of top government officials (if they can’t be found online, they can’t be criticized), to deeply obscure references, including “hairy bacon” (a coded insult referring to Mao’s embalmed body).
With dozens of phrases that could get a Chinese Internet user invited to the local police station “for a cup of tea” (a euphemism for being detained by the authorities), Blocked on Weibo offers an invaluable guide to sensitive topics in modern-day China as well as a fascinating tour of recent Chinese history. -
Digital Disconnect
$18.95 – $27.95Hailed as “important” (Truthdig) and praised for its “excellent insight” (Patricia J. Williams, The Nation), Digital Disconnect, by activist and “exemplary public intellectual” (Choice) Robert W. McChesney, skewers the assumption that a society drenched in information in a digital age is inherently a democratic one.A prescient examination of the relationship between the Internet and the economy—one that has become even more relevant since its publication in hardcover—the book argues that capitalism’s colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance.
“A provocative and far-reaching account of how capitalism has shaped the Internet in the United States” (Kirkus Reviews) and “an excellent analysis of the problem where a medium with the capacity to empower people is itself becoming a tool of social control” (Daily Kos), Digital Disconnect is both a groundbreaking critique of the Internet and an urgent call to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.
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Two Billion Eyes
$18.95 – $27.95“Up until Two Billion Eyes,” wrote the Los Angeles Review of Books, “the view of Chinese media has often been limited…[Ying] Zhu expands the periphery of our vision.” Acclaimed in hardcover by experts on China, Zhu’s brilliant dissection of China Central television (CCTV) is the first book to look at the dynamic modern media conglomerate and official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, with an audience of over 1.2 billion viewers globally, including millions in the United States. With “cogent analysis and penetrating insight” (Publishers Weekly), Two Billion Eyes tells the groundbreaking story of this hugely influential media player.“A fascinating window into the emergence of a Chinese public sphere” (Fredric Jameson) and “an indispensable guide to the Chinese media landscape (The New Inquiry), Two Billion Eyes explores how commercial priorities and journalistic ethics have competed with the demands of state censorship and how Chinese audiences themselves have grown more critical. A “unique window” (South China Morning Post) into one of the world’s most important corporations, this is a crucial new book for anyone seeking to understand contemporary China.
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Bill Moyers Journal
$29.95 – $30.00This “provocative” and “absorbing” (Star Tribune) companion book to Bill Moyer’s acclaimed PBS series invites readers into conversations with some of the most captivating voices on the scene today, in what Kirkus calls “a glittering array of discussions.” From Jon Stewart on politics and media to Michael Pollan on food, The Wire creator David Simon on the mean streets of our cities, James Cone and Shelby Steele on race in the age of Obama, Robert Bly and Nikki Giovanni on the power of poetry, Barbara Ehrenreich on the hard times of working Americans, and Karen Armstrong on faith and compassion, Moyer’s own intelligence and insight match that of his guests and their discussions animate many of the most salient issues of our time.
With extensive commentary from Moyers, marked by his customary “respect, intelligence, curiosity, humor, and graciousness” (Booklist), here are the debates; cultural currents; and, above all, lively minds that shape the conversation of democracy.
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Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights
The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done To Fix It$19.95 – $19.99Essays by Thomas Frank, Clay Shirky, David Simon, and others: “Anyone concerned about the state of journalism should read this book.” —Library Journal
The sudden meltdown of the news media has sparked one of the liveliest debates in recent memory, with an outpouring of opinion and analysis crackling across journals, the blogosphere, and academic publications. Yet, until now, we have lacked a comprehensive and accessible introduction to this new and shifting terrain.
In Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights, celebrated media analysts Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard have assembled thirty-two illuminating pieces on the crisis in journalism, revised and updated for this volume. Featuring some of today’s most incisive and influential commentators, this comprehensive collection contextualizes the predicament faced by the news media industry through a concise history of modern journalism, a hard-hitting analysis of the structural and financial causes of news media’s sudden collapse, and deeply informed proposals for how the vital role of journalism might be rescued from impending disaster.
Sure to become the essential guide to the journalism crisis, Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights is both a primer on the news media today and a chronicle of a key historical moment in the transformation of the press. -
An Army of Phantoms
American Movies and the Making of the Cold War$19.99 – $29.95Acclaimed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context,” An Army of Phantoms is a “delightful” and “amazing” (Dissent) work of film history and cultural criticism by J. Hoberman, one of the foremost film critics writing today, addressing the dynamic synergy of American politics and American popular culture.
By “tell[ing] the story not just of what’s on the screen but what played out behind it” (The American Scholar), Hoberman orchestrates a colorful, sometimes surreal pageant wherein Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe. From cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms “remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to be: revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself” (Time Out New York). -
Bad News
How America's Business Press Missed the Story of the Century$18.95 – $24.95Where was the business press in the weeks and months leading up to the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression? As our economy unraveled, journalists struggled to keep up with the story of the century, grappling with an alphabet soup of derivatives, backroom deals, and toxic financial instruments. But many fault the media itself for having helped to create the bubble in the first place. Did the press fail its mandate as an engine of truth by buying into the hubris and exuberance of the preceding decades?
Bad News is a foundational text for navigating a controversy that will be studied for years to come. With contributions from leading journalists and academics—including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia Journalism Review‘s Dean Starkman, and Huffington Post business editor Peter S. Goodman—this collection presents a complex debate in a highly accessible format for anyone from curious readers and scholars to journalists themselves. And ultimately, the questions it raises illuminate the heated debate about the media’s role as guardians of our democracy.
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A Bomb in Every Issue
How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America$17.95 – $25.95A Bomb in Every Issue recounts the rise and fall of Ramparts magazine, which, for nearly a decade in the 1960s, was the nation’s premier leftist publication, combining radical content, sophisticated design, and public relations savvy to shape political journalism for a generation. Featuring interviews with David Horowitz, Peter Collier, Adam Hochschild, Christopher Hitchens, Todd Gitlin, Robert Scheer, Warren Hinckle, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Seymour Hersh, William F. Buckley, Noam Chomsky, Brit Hume, Bobby Seale, Howard Zinn, and others, A Bomb in Every Issue situates the magazine amidst student movements in Berkeley, the rise and fall of the Black Panthers in Oakland, and the acid-inflected Summer of Love in San Francisco while assessing the magazine’s impact on national media and politics. -
Beyond the Echo Chamber
How a Networked Progressive Media Can Reshape American Politics$19.95Strategies and success stories: “A must read for media practitioners, consumers, and progressives of all stripes.” —Chris Hayes
In the twenty-first century, a new breed of networked progressive media—from Brave New Films to Talking Points Memo to Feministing and beyond—have informed and engaged millions, influencing political campaigns, public debates, and policymaking at unprecedented levels.
In Beyond the Echo Chamber, media experts Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke tell the story of the rise of progressive media and lay out a clear, hard-hitting theory of ongoing impact. A vital strategic guide based on years of research and extensive interviews with key media players and new media experts, Beyond the Echo Chamber will change the national conversation about progressive media and the future of journalism itself. For progressive journalists, bloggers, producers, activists, citizens, and policymakers committed to change, here is a roadmap to victory. -
Viral Spiral
$26.95Reporting from the heart of this free culture movement, journalist and activist Bollier provides the first comprehensive history of the attempt by a global brigade of techies, lawyers, artists, and geeks of all stripes to create a digital republic committed to freedom and innovation.
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Submersion Journalism
Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine$26.95“Submersion journalism” happens when a reporter dares to see a story from the inside: to participate in the events at hand, sometimes undercover, and then to tell the tale from a distinct point of view rather than pretend to some ideal of objectivity. During the Bush years, Harper’s correspondents infiltrated the Republican machine, from its lowliest canvassing operation to its corporate and evangelical elite, and they posed as shady clients for sleazy blue-chip lobbying firms. They shot machine guns, lounged in Vegas brothels, and peered into secret tunnels in Mexicali. They terrorized art museums and touched off worldwide fads.
Here are some of the best examples of participatory reporting published in the past decade, called “brilliant work” by the Los Angeles Times.
Contributors: Charles Bowden Adam Davidson Barbara Ehrenreich Steve Featherstone Kristoffer A. Garin Gary Greenberg Roger D. Hodge Jay Kirk Willem Marx Morgan Meis Jeff Sharlet Jake Silverstein Ken Silverstein Wells Tower William T. Vollmann Bill Wasik
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Jews and American Comics
An Illustrated History of an American Art Form$29.95Readers have long cherished the work of comic masters such as Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Art Spiegelman, all of whom happen to be Jewish. Few, however, are probably aware that the Jewish role in creating the American comic art form is no less significant than the Jewish influence on Hollywood filmmaking. Filled with the most stunning examples of this vital artistic tradition, Jews and American Comics tells us how the “people of the book” became the people of the comic book.
With three brief essays by Paul Buhle, the well-known historian of American Jewish life, Jews and American Comics offers readers a pictorial backstory tracing Jewish involvement in comic art from several little-known strips in Yiddish newspapers of the early twentieth century through the mid-century origins of the modern comic book and finally to contemporary comic art, which has at last found its place in museums, in private collections, and on the bookshelves of both critics and millions of avid readers.
Featuring more than two hundred examples of the work of Jewish comic artists going back a century—much of which has been unavailable to the general public for decades—this extraordinary collection will be a major contribution to Jewish and American cultural history. Jews and American Comics is also a gorgeous package, sure to be treasured by comic art lovers and fans of Jewish culture—and destined to become the bar and bat mitzvah gift of the decade.
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Digital Destiny
New Media and the Future of Democracy$17.95 – $24.95With the explosive growth of the Internet and broadband communications, we now have the potential for a truly democratic media system offering a wide variety of independent sources of news, information, and culture, with control over content in the hands of the many, rather than a few select media giants.
But the country’s powerful communications companies have other plans. Assisted by a host of hired political operatives and pro-business policy makers, the big cable, TV, and Internet providers are using their political clout to gain ever greater control over the Internet and other digital communication channels. Instead of a “global information commons,” we’re facing an electronic media system designed principally to sell to rather than serve the public, dominated by commercial forces armed with aggressive digital marketing, interactive advertising, and personal data collection.
Just as Lawrence Lessig translated the mysteries of software and intellectual property for the general reader in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Jeff Chester gets beneath the surface of media and telecommunications regulation to explain clearly how our new media system functions, what’s at stake, and what we can do to fight the corporate media’s plans for our “digital destiny”—before it’s too late. -
The New Blue Media
How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics$24.95 – $24.99A look at the journalists and satirists who’ve helped transform the political landscape in the twenty-first century.
The New Blue Media traces the rise during the Bush years of new media stars: the news-saturated satire of The Onion, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report; the polemical assaults of Michael Moore and Air America; and the instant-messaging politics of MoveOn, Daily Kos, and the netroots. With the exception of Air America, all of these new media outlets have found commercial success—marking, says Hamm, a new era in liberal politics.
Does this new media matter? In 2004, both Michael Moore and MoveOn became major players; more recently, the influence of the netroots has sparked upheaval and debate within the Democratic Party. The New Blue Media examines this phenomenon in depth, and the reshaping of both the style and the substance of progressivism. -
Communication Revolution
Critical Junctures and the Future of Media$18.95 – $24.95In Communication Revolution—both a sharp and cogent analysis of the history of media studies and a clarion call for citizen participation—Robert McChesney argues that with the Internet and wireless technology set to overtake traditional media, we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to build a more egalitarian communication system. He brilliantly shows how communication scholarship has failed to rise to the challenge of conceiving what this system might look like, leaving it to the burgeoning media reform movement (in which he has been a key player) to fill the vision vacuum.
Bringing both his authoritative analysis and unparalleled historical knowledge to bear on an urgent issue of our time, McChesney challenges us to transform the way we think about media. As Noam Chomsky has said, “Robert McChesney’s work has been of extraordinary importance. . . . It should be read with care and concern by people who care about freedom and basic rights.”
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Information Feudalism
Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?$16.95 – $25.95In a few short years, the battle over intellectual property rights has emerged from obscurity to become front-page news. The continent-hopping, three-year court battle fought by activists to bring cheap versions of desperately needed AIDS drugs to South Africa is but one example of how this seemingly arcane area of international regulation has become a crucial battleground in the twenty-first century and is animating activists the world over.
This powerful book is the definitive history of how the new global intellectual property regime—the rulebook for the knowledge economy—came to be. Drawing on more than five years of research and more than five hundred interviews with key figures—including negotiators for First and Third World countries, leaders of multinational corporations, and public-interest experts, Information Feudalism uncovers the story of how a small coterie of multinational corporations wrote the charter for the global information order.
Information Feudalism is an authoritative history of the demise of the world’s intellectual commons, and a potent call for democratic property rights.
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Tragedy and Farce
How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, And Destroy Democracy$14.95Thomas Frank called Tragedy and Farce “an appeal to reason in a dark time.” Including the sharpest analysis of 2004 election coverage yet and the first detailed look at the burgeoning media reform movement, this book is both an exposé and a call to action. In it John Nichols and Robert McChesney—two of the country’s leading media analysts—argue that during the 2004 election and throughout the Iraq war and occupation, Americans have been starved of democracy’s oxygen: accurate information. More than anything John Kerry, George Bush, or even Karl Rove did, the media’s miscoverage of the campaign and war decided the election. Most disturbingly, the flawed coverage reflects new, structural problems within U.S. journalism.
Tragedy and Farce dissects the media failures of recent years and shows how they expose the decline in resources and standards for political journalism—as well as the methodical campaign by the political right to control the news cycle. In our highly concentrated media system it has become commercially and politically irrational to do the kind of journalism a self-governing society requires.
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Fighting Words
An Illustrated History of Newspaper Accounts of the Civil War$24.95 – $35.00An intriguing picture of life during the Civil War, through the newspapers of the period.
Delving into an untapped source to tell the story of the Civil War from an entirely new and fascinating perspective, Fighting Words provides a sweeping history of the conflict through colorful, idiosyncratic, and highly opinionated newspaper accounts from all sides of the conflict. A panorama-in-print of a fractious and frenzied nation through articles, editorials, and illustrations culled from more than eighty Civil War—era newspapers, most with markedly different agendas, Fighting Words is the perfect gift for Civil War buffs.
Coopersmith’s innovative new study is a reminder of the way in which, then as now, our understanding of the world is shaped by and powerfully reflected in the media. Lavishly illustrated with more than one hundred facsimile reproductions from the newspapers themselves, many never before available to a contemporary audience, Fighting Words includes accounts of such events as the capture and occupation of New Orleans, the drive toward emancipation, the enlistment of black soldiers, the New York City draft riots, class conflict in the Confederacy, and the assassination of President Lincoln. Educational and entertaining, rousing and often contradictory, it reveals the vastly different priorities, worldviews, and political objectives that shaped the war and its outcome.
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Stranger in a Strange Land
Encounters in the Disunited States$17.95Black, opinionated, and with a distinctly working-class London accent, Gary Younge is not your typical foreign correspondent. Yet, in three years as The Guardian newspaper’s New York correspondent, Younge has acquired a transatlantic reputation as one of the most thoughtful commentators on contemporary America. Combining insight and panache, he has precisely captured the intricacies of a nation perplexed at its growing isolation from the rest of the world and often bitterly divided against itself.
In these pages we listen in on expansive discussions with, among others, Warren Beatty, Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, Susan Sontag, and Maya Angelou. We take the stage with an extravagantly attired drag queen in John Ashcroft’s hometown, join the dinner table of a fundamentalist Republican who has just lost his son in the Iraq war, and ride a bus with a group of Guatemalan strawberry pickers on a latter-day Freedom Ride to Washington, D.C. Throughout we are in the company of a guide whose restless curiosity is framed with sharp political intelligence.
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The Dream Life
Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties$19.95 – $29.95In what the New York Times‘s A.O. Scott called a “suave, scholarly tour de force,” J. Hoberman delivers a brilliant and witty look at the decade when politics and pop culture became one.
This was the era of the Missile Gap and the Space Race, the Black and Sexual Revolutions, the Vietnam War and Watergate—as well as the tele-saturation of the American market and the advent of Pop art. In “elegant, epigrammatic prose,” as Scott put it, Hoberman moves from the political histories of movies to the theater of wars, national political campaigns, and pop culture events.
With entertaining reinterpretations of key Hollywood movies (such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Shampoo), and meditations on personages from Che Guevara, John Wayne, and Patty Hearst to Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan, and Dirty Harry, Hoberman reconstructs the hidden political history of 1960s cinema and the formation of America’s mass-mediated politics.
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Our Unfree Press
100 Years of Radical Media Criticism$19.95 – $60.00The FCC’s recent controversial decision to roll back restrictions on media conglomeration produced an outpouring of protest and dissent; more than 700,000 Americans personally registered complaints along with organizations as diverse as NOW and the NRA.
In Our Unfree Press, Robert McChesney and Ben Scott demonstrate that, like the corporations themselves, criticism of media monopolies has a long tradition. Featuring the work of Upton Sinclair, C. Wright Mills, Walter Lippmann, Noam Chomsky, and many others, this provocative anthology charts such topics as the consolidation of ownership, the role of advertising, and the corruptions of profit. An extensive lead essay contextualizes pieces spanning the Progressive Era to the present day, making it abundantly clear that countering the media oligarchs requires more than token reforms. A must-read for anyone concerned by corporate consolidation of the media, Our Unfree Press reveals the necessity of a radical revision in our perception of the business of media. -
Moyers on America
A Journalist and His Times$24.95 – $24.99The Peabody Award–winning journalist shares stories and insights into our country and the crises we face in an “eloquent selection of . . . commentaries” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Millions of Americans have invited Bill Moyers into their homes over the years. With television programs covering topics from American history, politics, and religion to the role of media and the world of ideas, he has become one of America’s most trusted journalists. Now Moyers presents, for the first time, a powerful statement of his own personal beliefs—political and moral. Combining illuminating forays into American history with candid comments on today’s politics, Moyers delivers perceptive and trenchant insights into the American experience.
From his early years as a Texas journalist to his role as a founding organizer of the Peace Corps, top assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent and analyst for CBS News, and producer of many of public television’s groundbreaking series, Moyers has been actively engaged in some of the most volatile episodes of the past fifty years. Drawing from these experiences, he shares his unique understanding of American politics and an enduring faith in the nation’s promise and potential. Whether reflecting on today’s media climate, corporate scandals, or religious and political upheavals, Moyers on America recovers the hopes of the past to establish their relevance for the present.
“Not only a good reporter . . . a first-rate storyteller.” —The Boston Globe -
Movies on Trial
The Legal System on the Silver Screen$25.95The popular culture of American law has never played a larger role than it does today in shaping the way we think about lawyers and the legal system. Our very definition of justice is now inseparable from motion picture and television images and popular legal narratives, from Hollywood westerns and O. J. Simpson to Law and Order and John Grisham. In Movies on Trial, law professor and movie aficionado Anthony Chase sorts out some of the complex and often contradictory notions Americans have about the legal system. He uses movies to investigate and inventory many of our deepest beliefs about law and politics, and provides a strong historical and intellectual context throughout. Analyzing Dirty Harry and True Believer for their commentary on the Miranda ruling and criminal procedure, and explaining tort law via The Verdict and A Civil Action, Chase also employs Three Kings to reveal changes in international law and The Rise to Power of Louis XIV to explore the rise of the modern state. Through the lens of film, he is able to describe and analyze the symbiosis between the image of law and its actual practice in our cultural imagination, in a genuinely illuminating and entertaining book.
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Muckraking!
The Journalism That Changed America$25.00In collecting the kind of reportage that all too rarely appears in this age of media triviality and corporate conglomeration, Muckraking! documents an alternative journalistic tradition, one marked by depth of vision, passion for change, and bravery. From the Stamp Act to the abolition movement to the Vietnam war, from the fight against patent medicines to the elimination of labor spies, from the integration of baseball to the safety of government atomic workers, and from putting people in jail to getting them out, this book illustrates the great journalism that has made America a better country.
With more than 125 entries that range across three centuries, Muckraking! brings together the greatest moments of American journalism. Supplying historical context and critical commentary, the book also includes a selection of influential photographs and illustrations. By turns compelling and shocking, Muckraking! is an anthology for anyone who feels passionate about the heights that journalism can climb or its ability to illuminate the darkest depths.
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